Burn
by RoseColoredBoy
Summary: An elaboration on the lab accident that kept Holtzmann out of CERN and it's unpredictable consequences. A ghost from Holtzmann's past is back and wants revenge. Holtzbert Slowburn Warning: This is NOT a light story; It is graphic and not for the faint of heart. Please use caution proceeding, and please be aware of what you can handle.
1. Chapter 1

Her hands ached with the cold, the tips of her fingers fading to a soft blue that reminded her of late-summer clouds. They were tied tightly with rope that snaked around her wrists, across her bare chest and beneath her in tight knots. It had been so long since she had been in the woods, having surrounded herself with buildings and people and noise. Silence frightened her and now it wrapped her in its stiff, chilly arms beneath a sky painted with stars. She counted them, over and over, as her teeth had begun to chatter too hard to continue singing to herself. She _wanted_ to be held, but in real arms, to feel the weight of another body against her, to feel the warmth of another's skin against her own. With the thought came faces, swimming and gliding through the darkness; Abby's caring eyes and dimpled cheeks, her mother's thick blonde hair and freckled nose, Patty's eyes glinting from behind a book, and Erin. Erin. Erin. Her delicate features played like a shuddering film reel, swooping again and again across her vision, the dark tree tops swaying behind her translucent image.

"Erin." Her jaw involuntarily clamped down hard onto her tongue and a wave of what should have been a sharper pain shot down her throat, her mouth warming with blood. Her eyes narrowed as all at once fireworks burst to life in the distance behind Erin's ghostly face. _No_ , _fireflies!_ She thought, her face too cold to form the smile she thought she was making.

"Erin, look." The sound of her voice was garbled in thick blood.

Holtzmann tried to focus on the lights darting between tree trunks but they moved too quickly for her to follow. When she brought her eyes back to Erin's the physicist was gone.

"No. No. Erin? Erin!" Her chest heaved, droplets splattering her pale cheeks, the snow that dusted her neck and chest staining red. Her teeth bit into her tongue a second time.

Something cried out in the distance and suddenly the fireflies closed in on her, quickly growing to the size of oranges, weaving and crunching through the forest. Instinctually she slammed her eyes shut and behind the pink, veiny illumination of her eyelids voices and flashlight beams bounced around in the night.

"Got her!" someone called.

"Radio for a bus!" another.

"She doesn't look good." A third.

"Is she breathing?"

"She's bloody."

"Castlewick, notify the captain."

"I don't know."

"I got it."

Holtzmann had been holding her breath but blood tickled the back of her throat and a cough came bursting out of her, spluttering and painful. Eyes flashing open wildly they landed on a shocked, but kind, round face, be-speckled in spit and deep red dots. Behind the man stood two more, each in a dark grey uniform, one holding a wool blanket. The younger stood slack-jawed in terror. Another cough erupted from her and she struggled to catch her breath.

"Roll her over!" the older man shouted. "She's going to choke."

"Jillian…I'm going to have to roll you over, but I have to touch you to do that. You're safe now. I'm not going to hurt you, but I have to touch you. We will get you warm and cozy real soon, okay." She focused hard on his brown eyes, his chubby face. He hadn't seemed to notice the blood that decorated it.

"Can I touch you?" he held his gloved hands out in her line of vision and a radio crackled to life behind him. A soft voice spoke into the electric hum but she couldn't understand what it was saying.

She tried to respond and was lost in another coughing fit. Tenderly the man placed one hand on her right shoulder, and the other on her right hip, slowly slipping them beneath her frigid body he began lifting. Her scream ripped through the woods like a crack of thunder, accompanied by the faint popping sound of her skin peeling from the frozen ground beneath her. She convulsed in pain, tearing more skin and suddenly her world went dark, her body limp.

"Jillian?" The man's breath fogged into the air. "Richard, she's out. Get that bus here fast and tell them we need warm water." He shifted to cradle her weight in his arms without shifting her any further.

"She's frozen to a puddle of blood."


	2. Chapter 2

Her hair had been much shorter then; cropped close on the sides with a tuft of cream-blonde curls on top that trickled from the crown of her head to her nape. Dr. Goren had advised, her final round CERN interview was in just a few days, that Jillian forgo her Mohawk for a more reasonable pixie cut as soon as possible. She had been a little heavier then too, with a roundness to her cheeks that would eventually hallow with time. Subconsciously she reached for the patch of bare skin on the left side of her head, just behind her ear. She was never able to grow the hair back, which was why her hair was now always swept up and back across that side of her head. The sting of shrapnel seemed to still linger there, and suddenly she could smell the ionization, taste and smell hot, coppery blood and feel the audible pop of her eardrum blowing out. It had been nearly seven years since the accident. It hadn't been entirely her fault, but that didn't change anything.

She had been a fellow at a lab that farmed out PHD candidates and graduates into top scientific organizations and on a surprisingly chilly September afternoon Holtzmann had found herself alone in the lab, not unusual for a Sunday, setting up an experiment. She had been setting up several mock-ups for what would eventually be a much larger piece of equipment that would function as a radiation hardener and scrubber that could be placed in nuclear disaster sites like Chernobyl, and make them able to be worked in with robotic assistance and eventually inhabited. Or so that was Holtzmann's thesis.

Each mock-up consisted of a steel, silicon-on-insulator canister with an absorption conductor and series of supplemental containers linked by foam-encased tubes to the 'mother' canister. In its final form, at 8 feet tall and weighing in at two tons, it would be the first piece of equipment of its kind.

There had been a few hiccups in her previous mock-ups in which the device had been unable to scrub the absorbed radiation quickly enough to offset the thermal energy produced and the canisters had blown. This new batch had been made to slow the absorption rate in the conductor and to perform at a higher, but slower scrub rate to eliminate excess pressurization.

As Holtzmann bopped around the lab, lost in concentration and the Fleetwood Mac song flooding from the radio on her desk, she failed to hear the door to the la open and close, or the footsteps approaching from behind.

The lab's standard practice was to perform all tests with active or 'live' containers in radiation safes; sealed, magnetized lead boxes with a single, double sided acrylic observation window , and one was required to wear a radiation vest at all times. All were precautions against what was about to happen. With three canisters, the first a control from her previous batch, and two more from her latest iteration, placed in separate, open radiation safes, Holtzmann began to set up a fourth. It was also standard procedure to immediately secure and seal a radiation safe once a live container was placed inside, however, being on her own in the lab, Holtzmann had neglected to do so, opting to secure them all after she had placed each in their own safe. Then, one, two, three, she sealed the three new devices into their safes, right to left, and as she reached for the fourth, older model, she noticed the bulky figure beside her.

An older man, in his late 50's stood next to her, white lab coat hanging haphazardly on his shoulders and encasing his round, protruding stomach. It was her lab mate, a fellow PHD candidate, Calvin Goodhill. A man who in his mid-forties, had decided to take up nuclear engineering after years of working as a mechanical engineer. He liked to tinker and tamper, and could never keep his hands to himself, a trait that could be dangerous if one didn't know what they were doing. His professors and classmates had dismissed him as a washed-out, old hobbyist, looking for something new to do with his time and no real dedication, who wouldn't last long in the program. No one had known how true that would ring.

Before she could greet him his hand extended towards the fourth canister, his chest and abdomen un-shielded.

"No!" Her voice sounded as though it were a million miles away.

His blunt, round fingers were already touching the exposed canister, and as they clamped down it initiated.

Her ears popped with the bang and her eyes burnt and then all was black.

She awoke two days later to a searing pain on the left side of her head, a nurse's skilled hands gently sponging the molten skin there.

Holtzmann rubbed at the spot reflexively, staring at the darkened screen of her phone, abruptly back in the present. He was actually gone. She could feel her chest tightening, her fingertips tingled and suddenly the room seemed to tilt on an axis. A buzzing started in her ears, accented by something that sounded like her name. She had a white knuckle grip on the counter-edge of her lab table, the cool metallic surface grounded her enough to definitively pull her name out of the hum. Turning she met Abby's green eyes, marred with concern, her cheeks flushed.

"Hol-"

"Abby, I killed a man."

It was as though someone had cracked a whip inside of her. She felt electrified and exhausted at once, absently unfolding and refolding a tissue Abby had snuck into her hand as the panic attack had begun to subside. Her goggles lay on the kitchen counter top, fogged from the heat of her face and wet with spilled tears she had not anticipated and had been unable to control. She couldn't remember getting down the stairs, just the sensation of Abby next to her, one hand pressed gently to her chest, the other mirroring it on her back. She whispered softly to Holtz, asking her to count out loud in random order. It felt like untying a knot in her brain as the numbers spilled from her lips; a ball unwinding in her skull. Then she was pulling amber lenses off, the sound of them skittering across the granite bringing her back outside of herself.

"Water?" She looked up timidly at Abby, who was already up and reaching into a cabinet for a glass.

Holtzmann stared down at her own hands as the tap whooshed on. They shook so violently she was embarrassed to take the glass from Abby, electing instead to pretend she hadn't noticed Abby's outstretched arm until she set the glass down with a quiet thunk. For the first time since she'd sat down she met Abby's gaze.

"He has kids Abby. They're almost my age now." She winced and ripped the corner from the disintegrating tissue. Microscopic white tufts exploding from it to dust her dark pants. A different weight than what she had intended fell over Abby.

"Can they…?"

Holtzmann shook her head, blond curls bobbing.

"They elected not to press charges. They were, his wife too, they were estranged before the accident."

"But they kept him on life support for so long…"

"It was in his living will." She let out a tight smile that barely sank into her dimples, recalling Dr. Goren's words from the call that had sent her reeling.

 _It should have happened long ago._ Her mentor then went quiet for so long Holtz had thought Rebecca had hung up. _This isn't, and never has been your fault. Surely you must know that Jillian._ Then the dull hum of the deadened phone line.

Suddenly the firehouse's front door swung open, a deep, guttural cheer preceding Patty, then Erin, as they clumsily high-fived, packs slung low on their shoulders. Holtz immediately stiffened and turned towards Abby, eyes slammed shut as she whispered something over and over to herself. Abby looked down as the blond clenched and loosened her fists repeatedly, slower and slower.

"That ghost is toast!" Patty beamed, her pack thudding on the counter, one of their recorders loosely handing from its harness at her chest. They had recently switched to body-cams to better capture their spectral encounters.

"You gotta see this Holtzy!" Patty hadn't looked at the pair situated at the other end of the counter, but was instead too busy trying to unstrap the camera rig. Erin grabbed loosely at her arm, eyes locked on Abby's stern features.

"I got it Erin, I-" Erin's finger's tightened on her colleges arm, who looked from her white knuckle grip to the side of Erin's face, then followed her gaze to Abby and Holtzmann. Abby's face was tight and pale, the small woman before her beginning to rock with her back to the other two.

"Holtz?" Erin took a step towards them, eyes bouncing from Holtzmann's back to Abby, who had begun to shake her head. As she touched the younger woman's back the blond sat bolt upright, stealing Abby's attention from Erin. The blonde's eyes filled with fresh tears, glassy and red, and choking back a sob she squeaked out a rushed _'I have to go'_ before bolting past Abby and up the stairs to her lab, then back down with her own pack, the firehouse door slamming behind her as she launched herself into the autumn night air.


End file.
